"Inherent Vice": Thomas Pynchon beyond the Postmodern Fiction and Anti-Detective Novel

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pynchon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition – to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong – playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel.